


Absence Of

by Mercurie



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Loki Wins, Angst, Dark, Displaced Feelings, Everything Hurts, F/M, King Loki, Mind Control, Moral Bankruptcy, Paranoia, Villain Protagonist, Wordcount: 10.000-30.000
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-19
Updated: 2015-04-19
Packaged: 2018-03-24 20:00:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3782485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki wins the Earth. The Avengers are missing or dead. Thor is nowhere to be found, so Loki makes do with the next best thing: Jane Foster.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Absence Of

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Country of the Blind](https://archiveofourown.org/works/579325) by [Mercurie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mercurie/pseuds/Mercurie). 



> Thanks to my fic consultant bold_seer for her advice and to subjunctive for keeping me on track!
> 
> The rape/non-con warning is for mind-controlled sex.

Thor is gone. 

"But no one's found a body?" Loki says. His fingers whiten on the armrests.

The Chitauri sextet communicates its _no_ in pheromones and color shifts. 

"It's been five days. Make finding him a fixed thought in every unit's mind. I've won this world, now I mean to keep it."

They obey without words. He knows the command is spreading through their telepathic substructure already and turns away before they even leave the room. 

The problem has been occupying his mind ceaselessly. He sprawls on the second-rate throne the worker units have constructed in the room with Stark Tower's best view and broods. The room does not suit him: it has Stark's fingerprints embedded in its design, it is too small, too functional for an Asgardian king. Loki is a gaudy interloper, a peacock in a chicken coop. And his armor, heavy with the weight of a different world, is stifling and hot. 

He counts off what he has done and not done. He has won the battle, he possesses the Tesseract, but Thor is gone. He has killed Barton and Rogers and Romanoff and he holds Stark captive, but he has not found Thor. 

He is not safe. 

Ships and fliers darken his view of New York momentarily and continue on. His eyes follow them: his insect soldiers, searching the city again. They may do as he tells them, but he knows hatred curdles in their hearts. The compulsion set upon them by their true master still binds them. _Obey Loki. Submit to Loki._ For how long? One day mutiny will burgeon in their shared mind and boil over, and he will have no warning.

He is doubly not safe. 

He jumps from his throne and hurries to the laboratory – the precious one, Stark's personal laboratory, more heavily guarded than any other room in the tower. 

Selvig perks up at Loki's arrival, rubbing his hands together, cordial and eager. 

"How is she today?" Loki asks. 

In a gauzy cage of spun metal sits the Tesseract like a nest of spider's eggs in a cobweb. Its light dims and brightens with a rhythm all its own.

"She whispers." Selvig taps his temple with a curled, shaky finger. "More and more things. Not all of them make sense, though. Some are contradictory. It's very temperamental mathematics."

Continued exposure to the Tesseract isn't good for the man's mind. Loki knows. As soon as he stepped into the room the whispers jumped into his thoughts as well. Not words, but knowledge that requires no words. _Power. Use me. Make me yours._

If only he could. Every time he tries to force his mind into the dense matrix of space-time-magic-potency collapsed into this tiny glowing box, he slides off its edges: its one, continuous edge. The Tesseract is like a labyrinth where every turn leads out again. It feels like running his fingers along glass in the dark, unable to see, feeling for the crack. 

"Let's try again," he says. 

He must break through the shell. Once he's harnessed the ultimate power, he'll be secure. He has many enemies, but as long as he has this one weapon, they will never overcome him. 

Together they work over the Tesseract, Loki and his slave. For hours he strives with magic while Selvig fiddles with scientific tools. Loki sweats. The day grows long and the sunlight slants low through the windows and finally, when he is more tired than he cares to admit, the Tesseract gives him one heartbeat's flash of power; and closes up tight as an oyster again.

***

Thor has not come. Thanos has not come. Odin has not come.

All Loki's enemies remain invisible. He does not rejoice. He sends the Chitauri patrols out farther, across the nation, across the planet, as many as he can spare and still keep the city pacified. He watches them come and go. Stark Tower has so many great wide windows, he can see for miles from its heights and yet – there is nothing to be seen. No juggernaut of red and silver comes hurtling through the air to knock him from his perch.

He questions the prisoner, Stark, about Thor, but the staff doesn't work on Stark. Neither does torture. Loki thinks of certain techniques he witnessed Thanos use, once, on an ally who had grown unproductive (and how he had sneered then, secretly, at the crudeness of Thanos' tools), but he would have to administer them himself instead of having the Chitauri do it, and his hands feel curiously like water at the idea. 

Stark half-coughs, half-laughs at his back when he leaves the makeshift cell, curling his traitor hands into fists. The man probably knows nothing about Thor anyway. None of these humans could. He needs nothing from them. 

Loki storms back to the laboratory and toils over the Tesseract, straining to bend it to his will. He may as well try to lift a whole world on his shoulders. When Thanos finds him he will be defenseless. He curses Midgard, Thanos, the Tesseract, the Fates, Odin, and everyone else he can think of. Nothing has gone wrong – not yet – but he can feel failure hanging over his head. 

One of the patrols comes back, not with Thor, but with his woman. Jane Foster, a scientist. They bring her to the laboratory for him and he scrutinizes her. He's seen her before only in blurry flashes through the Destroyer's eyes. She's a pretty thing, but tiny and so weak. His brother made a mistake, choosing someone so vulnerable. All the better for Loki. Now he has a link to Thor in his power. 

The Chitauri tell him she has been on another continent of Midgard, running from his new regime. He imagines her watching him on failing televisions, listening on hidden radios to the news of country after country falling to the Chitauri. She must have heard the words spoken over and over: _Loki of Asgard._ Loki, brother of Thor. And wondered what she roused while prodding at the heavens and where the great hero is now and why he is not saving her.

"Where is Thor?" Loki asks her.

"Haven't seen him," she says, insolent. 

Loki smiles. Humans are so easy to read. Jane Foster doesn't wish to give him the satisfaction of seeing her angry and afraid. But this one isn't immune to the mind gem. 

He touches the staff to her breast and fills her eyes with blue.

"Now," he repeats, "where is Thor?"

She looks at him placidly. The blue eyes don't suit her. They make her eerie, and less beautiful, and the unnatural stillness of her expression doesn't help. "I don't know," she says. "He never came back." 

The words are calm. It must be the first time in a long time that she has felt no bitterness at that thought.

***

Loki paces his throne room. The city sprawls out below him like a naked body. Bare, but still mysterious.

There was an insurrection yesterday. A pack of humans rebelled. When the Chitauri caught them, they weren't trying to escape. They were pushing towards the tower. He is furious that these, the lowest in the hierarchy of his new world, lower even than the Chitauri who have at least left the mud of their own planet – _these_ should dare to dream of assassinating him. Not a blade forged on this feeble planet could even puncture his skin. If such an inferior hand ever comes close to touching him he will carry the shame with him into the realm of death. But there are so many of them. His army can't watch them all.

He has a new idea. He calls for Jane Foster. There's a use for her after all. 

"The staff," he says. "Can you increase its range?"

"Anything can be given greater range," she says, "as long as you have enough power."

He has power, he has ultimate power. Almost at his fingertips. 

"How would you like to work on a new project? An alien artifact."

"The Tesseract?" She's quick, but he expected that. The mind gem hasn't dimmed her curiosity or ambition. Her smile is small, but almost natural. "When can I start?" 

He sets her to work with Selvig. If only the staff worked on Stark, he would have three of them buzzing away at this most important of his obstacles. He knows he is unlikely to find others on this forsaken backwater who have any knowledge that might harness the Tesseract. 

When he splits it open at last, he'll be able use it to magnify the staff's power until he can reach into the minds of the billions of Midgard and mold them at his pleasure. And the Chitauri, too. None of them will oppose him any longer. None of them will want to.

***

He has had to kill Stark.

The human tried to escape. Since his will could not brought under the staff's command, he was unpredictable, forever dangerous. He had proved to be nothing but trouble. Loki fumes, snapping at the Chitauri viciously. _Such waste._ Stark could've been useful. This tower was his territory; he knew every hidden passageway and every piece of equipment in it. Which was what made him so dangerous to keep alive and free in the first place.

Loki has the body displayed on the street before the tower. The Chitauri use their knowledge of smelting together metal and flesh to fuse Stark's arms and legs into the cracked glass of the doors. So Stark becomes part of the monument he built to be so high and imposing when he was alive. Of his name emblazoned at its peak, only the A remains as epitaph. _A for annihilation. A for avenge._

It's not that Loki loves such coarse spectacles, nor does he think to frighten the populace into compliance. He has better methods of winning their submission. 

No. Stark had a glib tongue, and Loki remembers what the human said to him: _if we can't protect the Earth, you can be damn sure we'll avenge it._ His brother's little band placed such a high price on vengeance that they named themselves after it. He knows that if Thor hears of the atrocity, he will come running. Whatever strategy of concealment or stealth Thor is following, he will cast it to the winds and speed hither to teach Loki a lesson in return for the mutilation of his friend. The god of thunder has a hot head and a soft brain. 

So Loki has won another skirmish, and even Stark's defiant death will serve his ends. Still, he is not happy. His victory feels like a failure. He hadn't wanted to kill Stark, not now, he'd intended to find a way to make him subject to the mind gem. Stark forced his hand. He is always being forced, by others, to act too quickly. Inopportunely. 

To distract himself, he takes Jane Foster with him to tour the city on a Chitauri flying machine. New York is littered with debris from the battle and with everyday rubbish. No one has cleaned up and work proceeds at only a cringing, uncertain pace. The inhabitants scurry into doorways and shadows as Loki and Jane pass, glaring at them with hot sullen eyes. They are used to the Chitauri patrols but most of them have never seen Loki in the flesh before. 

But their resentment, Loki thinks, is not directed only at him. They do not know Jane and can't see the blue sheen over her eyes from this distance and wouldn't know what it meant if they did. They must assume she is a collaborator or a consort. They blame her instantly; it's easier to blame a human and a woman, to impute tired selfish and sexual motives, than to understand why an alien being they have no argument with has come from the skies to destroy them. 

"Does it bother you?" he says when they pass an old man who gives them a particularly evil eye from behind the dusty curtains of his home.

"Does what bother me?" She is sitting before him on the flier, and she turns so the wind doesn't blow away the words.

"To be thought a traitor by your people. To be thought my tart."

In her blue eyes nothing moves in response, no anger or resentment. "Is that what they think?" she says vaguely, and laughs a little. "Pretty weird."

Her will is an engine with no spark plug; she is not capable, he knows, of any desire or feeling that doesn't serve his purposes. Yet her placidity makes him uneasy. He wants to ruffle it. 

"Perhaps Thor will think the same when he learns you're with me. Does _that_ bother you?"

"But Thor knows about the staff," she says with nonchalant logic. "Right? You had Erik join you as soon as you arrived on Earth. So Thor's probably heard about it by now."

Her matter-of-fact tone leaves him with no reply. What can it be like, to know you have no freedom, and not be able to care? He can't imagine not feeling rage at being wronged. He doesn't want to. She is not a prisoner, not an ally, not a person: she's a tool, like Selvig. A tool to get to Thor.

Loki takes her all over New York to make sure as many people see her as possible. He keeps a possessive and conspicuous arm around her waist. Word will spread. Rumor flies faster than his Chitauri can. Word will find Thor where they cannot. And he will come, if not for his friend then for his woman.

***

Thor doesn't come.

Loki sits on the throne, tapping his fingers on an armrest. It feels more like an overdecorated chair today than most days. 

The humans have staged another insurrection. This time their attempt was not so pitiful. They had the green monster they call _the Hulk_ with them, and it tore a path through the city to almost within a few streets of his tower. No weapon the Chitauri possess so much as scratched its hide. They caught it in a net and flew it out to the middle of the northern ocean and dropped it into the waves, but Loki is sure the creature isn't dead. It's only a matter of time until the monster and the man wrapped around it make their way back. He isn't sure if the staff will work on the Hulk, either. 

No one has reported seeing Thor with this last of his comrades. No one has seen Thor at all, anywhere, since the battle. 

Is Thor dead? Loki asks himself the question for the first time. Was he killed in the battle? It seems impossible. Nothing on Midgard could kill Thor, save maybe for the Hulk itself, but the two of them fought on the same side. 

If Thor isn't dead, where is he? Why does he hide himself? It isn't Thor's nature to hide. And it is contrary to his honor to allow his friends to be captured and killed without protest.

Loki goes to the laboratory where Jane and Selvig are working on the Tesseract. As soon as he steps into the room, the cube's whispers amplify in his mind. The blue unrealities in its depths stir at his presence. His anxiety grows. 

Thanos has not come for the Tesseract, either. What is he waiting for? Loki cannot believe that Thanos would ever give up on the power the cube can offer him. He will come for it, and for revenge against Loki for closing the portal and keeping the Tesseract instead of handing it over as they agreed. It isn't Thanos' nature to relent. 

Nor has Odin shown his face. He is the All-Father, the protector of the Nine Realms, and the oath-sworn Heimdall sees everything that passes in them and so has by necessity seen what is passing in Midgard. Yet Odin has not come to oust Loki from his newly wrested throne. It is not in Odin's nature to be derelict of duty. 

He imagines them, Thor and Thanos and Odin, colluding against him. It's ridiculous: Thor and Odin would never sully their hands with someone like Thanos. Still he worries. Maybe they're letting him wait on purpose, letting him stew in ignorance while they plan a triple attack. Maybe they are gathering their forces and their sorcery even now. They could bide their time for centuries, only to strike when his vigilance has slackened. He'll never see it coming. He feels blind, staring up into a blue sky as opaque as the eyes of his new subjects, waiting for whatever lurks behind it to stir.

***

Summer is hotter here than in Asgard. Loki wishes for cold, for snow, for darkness. He crushes the desire. He knows where that wish comes from. He doesn't need snow and darkness, he tells himself. He has lived his life in the sunshine of Asgard and that's where he belongs.

He's standing outside in the cooling breeze on the platform that juts from the tower when Jane Foster comes to tell him they have made a breakthrough. 

"It's based on the machine Erik used to open the portal," she says. "We can tap into the Tesseract. It's only a tiny bit – like drips out of a leaky tap – but even that tiny bit will funnel enough power into the staff to broaden its electromagnetic field to cover the entire Earth."

He smiles. At last, a victory. There will be no more rebellions among the humans. His back will be secure when he faces whoever eventually comes to punish him. 

"Good work, Dr. Foster," he says. "Are you pleased?"

"Very," she replies, neither mocking nor sincere. 

Her unflappable calm needles him even though he knows he is the cause of it. 

"What would Thor say if he knew you were the instrument of his favorite realm's enslavement?" he wonders aloud.

"I don't know. I didn't know Thor very well."

"Oh? And yet he seemed so smitten with you. Weren't you his paramour?"

She shrugs. The question appears of little importance to her. How distant must her memories of Thor be by now? In the rigid grip of Loki's mind control, her former self has warped and twisted until only Loki's orders, Loki's concerns have priority in her life. But he knows the Jane Foster has not been destroyed, only suppressed. Her living mind is wintering, curled into a protective ball around everything she once was. The real Jane Foster is submerged too deep for the magic's frost to touch.

But he wants to touch it. To Loki, her indifference feels like resistance. He knows she isn't capable of fighting back, not even passively. Still, the very ease of her submission makes it feel unreal. He wants her to struggle and lose. He wants her to _know_ she has lost, and to care. 

"Tell me what he was like. My brother." Surely he can find something that will prick her. They didn't name him Silvertongue for nothing. "It must have been a very different experience from your human men. Did you enjoy him?"

"What do you mean?"

"He fucked you, didn't he?"

She shrugs. "Oh, no. We just kissed one time."

He laughs, jeering. Jane tilts her head curiously, unruffled. His laughter dies. She's serious, he realizes. This woman he thought a vixen who sapped Thor's manhood and turned him soft is in fact nothing but a day's flirtation. 

He feels confused and slightly ludicrous. Spite wells up in him. It's like they've made a fool of him together, Thor and Jane, without even trying to.

"Then you've never known the pleasure of lying with a god," he says, tracing her jaw lightly as if examining the bone structure of a new purebred hound. "Did Thor tell you I'm accounted an uncommonly good lover?"

"He never really mentioned you."

His fingers still. Suddenly he wants to hurt her. He wants to hurt Thor, but Thor isn't here and she is the closest thing Loki has. The closest thing he has to Thor is a mortal Thor kissed once, a year ago, and couldn't be bothered to come rescue. His fingers twist and tighten; the skin beneath their tips whitens and Jane gives the most patient, least accusatory grimace he's ever seen. He lets go.

"The staff," he grits through a vicious smile. "Let's do it now."

***

Reinforced by the Tesseract's power, the staff glows as if a star has been plucked from the heavens and set into its frame. Loki puts it to work immediately. His will unfurls streamers of magic and sends them slithering over the globe until each of them finds an unimprisoned mind and touches it softly, so softly. No one can see this magic, not even him, but all around the world people's eyes turn glassy and brilliant, no longer windows to their souls but mirrors for Loki's. At last his plans move forward. Resistance movements stop. Guerilla soldiers lay down their arms. The few remaining holdouts against the Chitauri surrender.

Loki admires the shining gem that holds the human race in its unyielding fist. It is linked directly to the Tesseract now, drawing in dollops of invisible power. Is he imagining it or have the cube's whispers really grown louder? It feels like there's a ringing in his ears just below the level of perception, a tinnitus of almost-heard murmuring. 

He shakes his head, shakes off the feeling, and considers what he will do with his new power. 

He rebuilds the armies destroyed by the Chitauri. They are his armies now. He integrates them with the Chitauri, all together under the control of the mind gem. He has the humans dig up every secret weapon kept in reserve by every government. His realm is as well-protected as its means will allow. 

When he tires of playing with toy soldiers, he turns to economy. The people of Midgard return to their fields and factories. They no longer fight each other, for they have nothing to fight about; and they no longer create for they have nothing to express. But they build and craft and toil and bring him tribute. 

They bring him works of gold and silver, brittle and dull as charcoal compared to those of Asgard. They bring him wines with a fraction of the fire of those of Asgard and silks in dull and uninspired colors. They bring him beautiful women and men to worship him. They call him "king." "God," they say, and "lord." 

At first it amuses him. So this is what it means to be king. Their devotion is more complete than anything he could have wrested from the people of Asgard. Yet there is a hollowness to it, a lack of enthusiasm. Or rather, they are enthusiastic as long as they remain directly in his line of sight; but if he turns his head, glances at them from the corner of his eye, he thinks he can see their faces fall slack like puppets no longer animated. It disturbs him. He finds himself trying to watch all of them all the time. The strain shatters his new-found pleasure, and dissatisfaction grows once more in his breast. It's his will they are expressing, he thinks, not their own. Is he not merely worshiping himself through their eyes?

The obsequies have grown tiresome anyway. He sends everyone away, tells no one to approach unless the matter is urgent. Now he wanders from room to room of the tower, brooding alone. Outside, humanity hums on slowly on like a sluggish anthill. They don't appear to require his direction. He does not quite understand what he has created. Is he not a king? Restlessness prickles beneath his skin, spurring him to wander faster, hurrying nowhere. He bursts with energy, ready for the attack, prepared for anything. There's nothing to be prepared for. 

Something, somewhere has gone wrong with his plan. He can't pinpoint it. His mind needs a whetstone. 

He sends for Jane Foster.

***

There are no more insurrections. Thor, Thanos, and Odin make no appearance. The Hulk reemerges to terrorize a city on another continent. The Chitauri drop him in the middle of the northern ice field this time. Loki grows ever more bored and anxious. He has billions of eyes all over Midgard now and none of them have seen Thor, alive or dead.

Where is Thor? Where is Thor? The thought circles in his head, round and round. 

"Where _is_ he?" Loki hisses to himself. 

He is looking out the wall of windows before the tower's platform, out over the quiescent city. The day is too hot again. Jane Foster, his shadow, stands beside him, silent and still as winter. 

"Who?" she asks.

"Who do you think? Thor!" Who else would Loki be looking for? Who else is there of consequence? He's asked himself the question a thousand times. He's asked Jane a good many times, too, but all she ever responds is that she doesn't know.

This time she has a different answer. 

"Maybe he went home," Jane says idly.

Loki stares out over the city. He feels suddenly small and unimportant. Has Thor returned to Asgard? Has Loki overestimated Thor's interest in this world? He imagines Thor and Odin and Frigga, feasting and singing and riding in Asgard, too busy with important matters to spare an eye for who is conquering whom in the mortal realm. Have they even noticed him?

He thinks of feasts and songs in Asgard. He thinks of his mother and the way the stars shimmer through the ocean spray.

He wants to go home.

He looks at Jane Foster. She looks back, empty, and awaits his instructions. The unnatural blue of her eyes makes him shiver. Then he grows angry that she can make him afraid, angry that she can make him feel anything. His anger waxes, roaring and incandescent, so hot he can almost hear it crackle like he can almost hear the Tesseract whisper. He is angry at this city and these people, at Thor and at Odin, at Jane Foster, at the Hulk, at the Chitauri and Thanos, at Jotunheim and the jotuns; and yet he is not satisfied, he has more anger than he needs for them, he has an endless fount of anger within him and he cannot tell who else it is he is angry at. 

Will he have to burn this whole world down before someone comes?

Jane Foster is still standing obediently at his side. 

"Take off your clothes," he says. 

Is there a hint of rebellion in her eye? Of horror? Humiliation? He searches, but he must have imagined it. She's no more perturbed than if he'd told her to pour him a glass of water. The garments come off, efficiently, without a hint of sensuality. Then she waits. 

She won't do a thing unless he tells her to, he realizes. Words have always been his friends, but now they stick in his throat. _Command your subject, king._ But he can't. His weakness infuriates him further. 

He resorts to force. He slams her up against the glass harder than he needs to. She's so light and fragile he could tear her limb from limb if he tried. He imagines she is this city, she is her planet, she is the representative of her whole species that he is fucking into submission. He imagines Thor watching – he wishes Thor had Heimdall's eyes so he could see. He envisions Thor's face breaking into anger and horror and jealousy. He can't break Thor, but he can break Jane Foster. She is a thing that Thor hardly cared about, a discarded bauble, but at least she is something tangible he can crush. 

Through his haze of rage and lust he feels her unearthly eyes watching him, so close he can almost see the brown behind the blue. She doesn't look crushed. Is he imagining things, or is there a hint of laughter in them? For a horrible moment he thinks he might vomit. Then he covers her eyes with his hand. Now she is not Jane Foster anymore, she's just a body, and he isn't sure why he's doing this – something has gone wrong, all his plans, everything is off-kilter – but now that he's started, he can't stop. There is no turning back. There is no turning back. There is no turning back.

***

Crushing Jane Foster proves as elusive a goal as locating Thor.

He tries his hardest. He takes her on the lab table in front of Selvig. Neither of them react. Only he feels the shame of it, only he is roused by it: he is as solitary in sex as in conquest. The Tesseract hums and whispers, ringing, beating in his mind. He thinks he can see it, that incomprehensible power, looking at him out of Jane's eyes; and he can't reach it through her body any more than he can reach it through his magic. 

After that he is so unnerved he doesn't speak to Jane for days. He stays away from the laboratory. His reason tells him there is nothing to be unsettled about. All these people are his slaves. None of them will blame him, hate him, want vengeance on him, no matter what he does. In a fit of anger he sends for Jane again – he _shall_ win this contest of wills, if not with her then with himself – he has her stand naked while he receives mirror-eyed servants bearing the latest tribute. They nod to her politely and she smiles back as if they're work colleagues meeting at a conference. He considers taking her in front of them, but the thought makes his cheeks warm. Everyone ignores this, also politely, and he feels patronized, and furious, and paralyzed.

He banishes them all in a fit of anger. 

"Do you think to mock me?" he snaps at Jane.

"Me? No. Do you want me to? I've never been much of an actress." 

She is not capable of feeling humiliated. He's trying to master a doll, not a woman. The only person on this world who can still be humiliated is himself. 

"Get out!" he snarls. 

Everyone leaves him again. He sinks into a brooding sulk, not even bothering to pace anymore. He glowers over the cityscape full of its peaceful, unresisting, mindless populace. Weeks pass and nothing changes. 

Perhaps no one will ever come. Thor won't save Midgard. Odin won't restore order to the Nine Realms. Thanos won't claim his revenge or the Tesseract. Loki has won, and this is his prize.

***

He grows listless. His listlessness infects the room and the tower and the city. Midgard groans and stutters: work slows, trade grows haphazard. Loki no longer wants tribute, so no one makes any. Chitauri armor rusts and they are too slovenly to clean it. Rubbish piles up in the streets of New York once more. A waste treatment plant breaks and the workers are slow to repair it. Even up in the tower, the hot summer breeze carries a trace of stench.

Loki no longer bothers with the throne room. He lies in Stark's bed, sweating in the heat, his armor and finery cast off in the corner. He thinks of what to do. Where else can he go? What else does he want? He has Midgard. He has the staff. The Tesseract could extend its range even further. The Tesseract's power will never be exhausted. He could go to another realm and lay its people under his command. 

He could go to Jotunheim and make their eyes as blue as their skin, he could make them sorry, they who abandoned him as a child for being unworthy, they who judged him before he could so much as crawl. Only, he knows, they won't be sorry. Not once they are in the mind gem's power. They will be biddable, they will act sorry if he tells them to, but they will feel nothing. The wellsprings of their feeling will be frozen over. 

In his imagination he builds an empire, world by world, people by people, Loki as king of all. Fire giants and frost giants, light elves and dark elves – under his rule they will all be alike. There will be no need for war. Or for warriors. No one will cast aspersions on him. He imagines himself ruling Asgard at last: he is climbing the branches of Yggdrasil, he is ascending to the high summit of his destiny. The masses bow to him and he can see, as if with Heimdall's sight, the crowding peoples of all the worlds bowing too. He tries to picture Thor among them, sky-blue eyes turned ice-blue, but he cannot, his imagination stalls: there is an empty space. 

He imagines himself alone in his bedroom in the palace, mannequin worlds hanging in the heavens around him all as empty as this one. He will twitch a finger and they will dance grotesquely. The horror of solitude closes his throat. It makes no difference; this is no one to talk to. 

He calls – he screams, voice cracking – for Jane Foster. 

When she comes, he is sitting on the edge of the bed in his undershirt, his hair disheveled, his hands steepled. He gets up, hauling the staff from where he's left it carelessly behind the bedstead. 

"What do you need?" Jane Foster says, oblivious to his disarray.

He sets the tip of the staff to her heart. 

The blue fades from her eyes, moment by moment like a crust of ice melting from a lake. She blinks and shakes her head. The shadow of realization and horror and disgust that sweeps over her face tells him that yes, at last, someone is looking back at him. 

Jane slaps him as hard as a human of her size is able. Loki smiles. She has done exactly what he wanted her to do. At his expression her hands curl into fists. 

"Bastard," she says. There are no words acid enough. There is no violence great enough for her fury, he knows. Only now that he has freed her can she feel what he wanted her to feel. He drinks it in: the expressiveness of another conscious, sentient mind. She wants to murder him a thousand times over; and yet even as she thinks this he sees her check and wince. It is not her inclination to lash out, not her nature to kill.

She stumbles away from the smiling mask of his face to the long windows. New York, crushed. Earth with all its invention, all the cleverness she, the scientist, has so loved and dedicated her life to, has been laid low. Laid lower than anyone could ever have thought. Loki drifts behind her, fascinated. What is she thinking now? She must remember everything that has passed, distant as if through wavy, discolored glass but unmistakably real. The people of New York, first skittering and fearful, then placid and indifferent. Walking past Tony Stark's body whenever she passed through the door. She is standing in a dead man's bedroom. 

She must remember tapping into the Tesseract, making all this possible. She must remember Loki touching her body, _inside_ her body. She closes her eyes and her lashes lie dark against her skin and, hazily, a lightning flash of desperation crackles when she opens them again. There are no tears. Then her face grows stony, but it's an imperfect mask, nothing like the blankness that went before it. 

"Well?" says Loki impatiently.

"Why did you wake me?" Her voice sounds thick.

He draws near, his steps slow and soft like the belly of a snake slipping over leaves. 

"To reward you," he says. He feels as if he, too, has woken from weeks of sleep, refreshed, electric. 

" _Reward_ me? For what?"

"Why, for giving me Midgard. I couldn't have done it without you, Jane."

His presence behind her is like a hand on her neck. She is afraid, not of him, but of the staff and its glittering eye of a gem, of what she might do under its power, of what she might say if he asks. He has such power over her, the ultimate power. He doesn't even need to actually use it. She will give him anything he wants to keep herself out of the soft cold grip of that magic. He knows it, and she knows he knows it. He can feel her hatred like a wildfire kept in precarious check. 

"Gods," she spits under her breath. Is she thinking of Thor, too? She must long for the days when she didn't believe in them.

***

Loki calls her _Queen of Midgard_. He even fashions a crown for her.

"You must be joking," she says, aghast.

"Not in the least," he replies. Though it is a joke, only not the one she thinks it is.

He commands that tribute be brought again. He sets her on his throne to receive it and loiters idly on the sidelines, smirking, watching. Everything the delegations bring is for her now. Gowns by fashion designers whose names, judging by her nonplussed expression, are as foreign to her as they are to him. Huge, bright pieces of jewelry – gold everything, gold and emeralds. His colors. Exotic delicacies from around the world that she can barely pronounce. Luxuries she's never heard of or dreamed she might ever enjoy. Does she like such things? He doesn't really care. They are pawns in his game.

She sits uncomfortably still on the throne, nodding at the gifts laid out at her feet. He imagines how feverish her thoughts must be. What does Loki want from her? What will entertain him enough to allow her to remain free? He paces like a wolf at the far end of the room, watching, always watching nothing but her. The Tesseract's whispers fade; the shadows of Thor, Thanos and Odin recede into the background. His attention is consumed. He's distracted at last. 

When she tries on the dresses in the room he had given her (close to his own), he waits demurely outside; but he always comes in afterwards and straightens hems, adjusts necklaces, turns her side to side. His fingers linger on her necklace, brush over her hair, ghost along her shoulders. She is too petrified to shudder. He is never satisfied. There is always another dress to try, another strange food to taste, and he asks her, politely, with a cruel gleam in his eye, how she likes them. She fumbles for answers, anything that will please him. Finally she is the one who's afraid of him. He delights in her fear, but he's waiting, too, for it to thaw: for Jane to make the next move.

After a week of this, he gets what he's waiting for. She shrieks aloud and throws her crown across the room. She tears at the latest dress, a ridiculous gauzy white affair, ripping its seams to rags. 

"Hmm. You're right," Loki says. "That one was ghastly."

"What are you _doing_?" Jane yells.

He spreads his hands, all innocence. "Looking for a color that will set off your beautiful eyes as they deserve."

"Do you really expect me to believe that?" _You're crazy_ , he can see her thinking. He ought to tell her she looks just as mad as he does.

He stalks closer, drinking her in like a life-draught and he realizes that _this_ is what he has wanted all along. He wants someone to fight back. 

Perhaps she understands this. She picks up the crown and hurls it at him this time, and then a necklace, a brooch, a dress, the stupid Parisian silk scarves, the stiletto-heeled shoes, everything, everything back at him. "I hate all of it! I hate _you_!"

The gifts she's throwing in his face bounce off, harmless as bullets. He flits through the hail and grabs her flailing hands. She struggles, but of course he is stronger. He forces her hands down and glee surges through him as he feels her give way; he is happier than he's been in months. He spins her around and wraps his arms around her, trapping her back against his chest. 

"And after I've been so generous," he hisses in her ear. 

"Thor," Jane says blindly. The word catches Loki off guard – though why should it, why should he be surprised to hear his brother's name on her lips – that's what this is all about, that's why he's trapped here, and why she is trapped here too. "Thor –"

His grip tightens. "What about him?"

"He's coming back," she says, not struggling now. The words ring without conviction. "He'll come back. He'll stop you. He'll do something. Something!"

"He's never coming back," Loki says, and suddenly the absence, the silence like a great mouth threatens to swallow them both. They are locked together in abandonment. No one is coming back for them. Wherever Thor is, he has forgotten Loki as thoroughly as he has forgotten his three-day tart. There is a caving, a crumbling inside Loki's chest and it feels like he's clasping Jane to hold himself up rather than to keep her still.

He kisses the side of her neck. Her skin tastes familiar to him. She feels familiar to him. Her body. Her scent. His senses have grown used to her. But now it's not humiliation he seeks – he is not thinking of Jane, he is feeling a yawning gulf inside him only dimly perceived before, and there's no one else to soothe it with. 

But Jane remembers as well. She shudders and shudders and, heedless of their difference in strength, fights against his clinging hold. Loki falls back. 

She doesn't look at him. She straightens, breathes, and walks out of the room.

Loki stares after her. He ought to follow. His blood is up. Her defiance warms him like a shot of liquor. But something inside him flinched when he felt her shudder. He is wounded. And if she does it again – if she pushes him away – he will bleed. 

He tells himself there is plenty of time. He can afford to wait. _She_ will come back. She must.

***

Jane doesn't come back. Loki sends Chitauri to look for her. They find her outside the city, hiking towards the countryside. She doesn't bother to resist when they bring her back to Stark Tower.

Loki is waiting for her in her room, fiddling with the trinkets and costumes she hates. The movement is blind, thoughtless. He doesn't see the cloth beneath his fingertips, but the back of Jane's head, receding. The back of Thor's head receding as Loki sped away from him for the last time on a Chitauri flying machine. 

Jane stops between her two Chitauri escorts. What has she been thinking, on her long walk? All he has to do is fetch the mind gem and she will tell him. It would be easy to make her a slave again. It would be easy to kill her. They both know it. But she doesn't look afraid any longer. Perhaps she has realized what is only dawning on him now: if he destroys Jane Foster, he will be alone again, alone on this world of meaningless creatures. Even if he releases another of them it will not be another Jane Foster, who was there when Thor was banished, who was there when Thor fell to the Destroyer, who has touched Thor, who changed Thor in a way Loki could not in all their centuries together. 

Of course, there are many other things Loki could do to her. But he knows he is the foregone winner of any confrontation, and he wants a long game. 

"Well, if you were that desperate to get away from New York, you should've said so," he says. 

"It isn't New York I want to get away from." She makes no effort not to sound sullen. 

"The heat, perhaps? I find it a bit oppressive myself. Bring something warm." He throws her a shawl.

"Where are we going?"

He takes her to the southern hemisphere where it is winter. They fly in a Chitauri craft from Cape Horn to the Cape of Good Hope (Jane laughs) to New Zealand. He brings along the Tesseract with its own escort and Selvig to tend it, but he's too absorbed with his new distraction to pay it much heed, as long as its voices stay calm and even.

He shows Jane far more of the world than she has ever seen before – this world, her world, the ground beneath her instead of the distant stars – and he makes sure to show her to the world as well. He expands the strategy he began half by accident on their first flight through New York. Everywhere they go they are greeted by dignitaries who may be robbed of their will but not of their intelligence. They can see that Jane's eyes lack the blue sheen of everyone else's. Loki is always careful to be solicitous, even doting, in the presence of others. They must assume she is his consort of her own free will. What will happen to her if Loki ever loses his grip on Earth? They will tear her to pieces. He wants to leave her no choice but to throw her lot in with him. For her own protection.

In private, he smiles slyly in response to her glares of hatred. 

"Why are you doing this?" she asks, standing on the balcony of their hotel in Ushuaia. _Ushuaia._ Tierra del Fuego, the land of fire, though it's all glaciers and icy waters as far as Loki can tell. A pleasant climate at last. "What's the _point_?"

"I thought you might enjoy a tour of your realm," he says innocently.

He wants to torment her. But he also wants her to fight back. When she does, she chooses a weapon he hasn't predicted. 

Slowly, purposefully, she walks to the railing of the balcony. She hoists herself onto it with a little jump and twists around so her legs dangle off the edge. The suite is very high up. The snow-clad landscape below looks peaceful. She leans forward. 

Loki moves before he's conscious of movement. His arm snakes around her waist and yanks her back onto the balcony.

"Little fool! What do you think you're doing?" His heart is pounding. How dare she? 

It's Jane's turn to be innocent. "I was just admiring the view."

"Liar. Do you think you could escape me so easily?" His eyes narrow to slits. It had not occurred to him that she might rather be dead than play his game. 

"There are things even you can't do." Like resurrect the dead. No, he can't allow that. The strength of his own reaction surprises him. Perhaps he should set a watch on her. 

This time she makes no move to get away from him, and slowly Loki relaxes. Her hands come to rest on his where they are holding onto her waist. He's not wearing his armor today. She slides her fingers along the insides of his wrists. 

Loki's lips part in surprise. Is the reckless woman trying to seduce him? She is staring at him in a peculiar way. He finds in her an odd change of mood. 

He steps away, puts a safe distance between them. She cannot harm him physically, but there's no armor for the soul. Now that he's freed her from his mind control, she can think and say anything. He finds he's on edge, waiting for her next unpredictable swerve. 

Jane acts as if nothing has happened. Suddenly he cannot understand her, what he thought a simple mind has become intractable. The soft skin of his wrists tingles where she touched him. 

The next day they move to a new city. Jane makes herself difficult, but not too difficult; enough to make Loki angry but not murderous. She touches him sometimes, when he least expects it, and never in the same way twice. He is wary at first, but the wariness gives way to fascination: he is engrossed in the game. For a while he forgets about Thor's unnerving absence. Her mind has taken a turn and he cannot see around its corner; but sometimes a strange flash of intent lights her face and vanishes again, spilling out of her like candlelight through the fingers of a cupped hand: blood-red and flickering. He drifts closer, hypnotized.

***

The tension in Loki's mind grows sharper by the day. By the time they return to New York, it's singing, a string at breaking point. In their absence the city has continued in its business as calm and industrious as a beehive.

"And what do you think of your new world?" he says. They're in Stark's bedroom again. Jane is staring out the windows, her back to him. He shrugs off his overcoat. The summer heat is still here, still heavy. "Now that you've had a chance to see it."

"Do you really have to ask?" Jane tosses her head, irritated. 

"You must admit that I've changed quite a few things for the better."

"Nothing you do is _ever_ better. You're like a walking Murphy's Law."

He shifts tactics. "Which was your favorite?"

Her head turns. "What?"

"Which of the places we visited was your favorite?"

She thinks for several moments, and when she answers it's without hostility. "The Tibetan Plateau."

"Closest to the heavens?"

"Farthest from Earth." Though the words are bitter, Jane's tone is not. She sounds tired; her head droops to the side. He experiences a weakness, an urge to brush at the strand of hair that hangs limp over her cheek. 

He slips his hand under the curtain of hair, his fingers gliding over her nape. Is this the only piece of Earth that doesn't belong completely to him? If he can win her over without the staff, his ownership of this world, this people, will be real and not just an illusion wrought by magic. 

"I could take you there, too, you know," he says.

She's perfectly still. "Where?"

"To the heavens. Higher than you've ever dreamed. To other worlds."

She looks him straight in the eyes for once, her brow furrowed in thought instead of anger or disgust. "I've always wanted to see another world."

"I know. We can go as far from Earth as you like." If he takes the other Realms, they may never have to come back to this dusty little globe. "Would you like that?"

Her lips part. She doesn't say anything, but he thinks he can see the _yes_ struggling to slip out, if she will only let it. She has too much pride. But he has learned to read her, he thinks. All the little touches, the barbed comments that have become less and less barbed over time. He's given her things she has always wanted, and that, he knows, is the most effective coercion of them all. 

He kisses the corner of her mouth. He's looking for the _yes_ that has been growing in her, that he's nurtured in her, since the day she tried to run away from him. He has been patient, but with the taste of victory so nearly on his tongue, it's difficult not to sink his teeth in. 

He kisses her. Her body seems to melt against his. His ears are rushing; the world disappears around him. The great absence between them is gone. The empty space inside him shrinks. He's finally close to someone again. _So_ close. Jane's hands slip under his shirt, and she's not shuddering away from him this time, she's pliant and willing as he would hardly have dreamed her being. 

_Victory_ , he smiles against her lips. 

A sudden pain saws into him. He wrenches free, staggering. What has happened? Jane is staring, open-mouthed, and there's blood all over her pale green shirt. Is she hurt? Are they being attacked?

"Jane?" he says. 

Faintness sweeps over him. A white blankness suffuses his vision and he has to fight for consciousness. When his sight returns, Jane is gone and he's staring at his blood-covered hands as they run over and over his chest. It's the bodyknife, he realizes in horror. The tiny, triangular blade tucked into the hidden pocket in the sleeve of his undershirt. His last line of defense. A blade not forged on Earth – a blade that can break an Asgardian's skin. Invisible unless you know where to look. _How did she know where to look?_

He remembers Jane's hands on his wrists, all the light touches over the weeks. Terror and shame gag him and the horrible sinking knowledge that he has made a mistake, a miscalculation perhaps beyond repair. Jane Foster has made a fool of him. She hasn't been seducing him. She's been reconnoitering him. 

His slippery fingers pluck at the wound between his ribs, but it's a blade without a hilt and she's rammed it in so far that he can't get a grip on it. The pain eats into him as if the knife is still moving, grinding of its own accord through his muscle towards his heart. He pants, clawing at the pain. His breath is a waterfall in his ears. 

"Jane!" he howls, turning, searching for her. _Help me, you human bitch_ , he thinks nonsensically. 

The world lurches and spins. The heaving ground jumps up and smacks into his entire body. Something has tangled up his feet. He rolls awkwardly, and through a haze of blood and panic sees Jane standing over him, the scepter she's just used to knock him off his feet in her hands. 

Time is moving too fast, seconds are skipping ahead. A moment ago he was king of everything he laid eyes on. Now his only view is the floor streaked with his own blood. Jane is at his feet, then she's by his side, then the sunlight slants off the curved edge of the raised scepter, its sharp edge as deadly and inhuman as his knife, and its haft goes up and then it comes down and _crack!_ , _crack!_ , _crack!_ , the world is splitting like an egg, ringing, shattering. Red suffuses his vision. His eye is a ruin, his face must be a ruin even though he can feel no pain. The world is cut in half, Jane has broken it in two. He sucks at the air but it won't obey him. Not even his own body will obey him. 

Through a veil of red, paralyzed, he sees Jane moving, jerky as a puppet inexpertly controlled. She plucks the glowing gem from the scepter and carries it to the open window. _No._ His dominion. So easily it falls. It drops from her hand to begin the long descent to where it will shatter on the pavement far below; and Loki's last, hysterical thought as he watches Jane watch it plummet is that he will probably disintegrate before it does. She doesn't even look back to watch him die.

Red turns to black. Loki is gone.

***

Loki opens his eye in Hel. No: the Gate of Hel. He stands in the gloom of a wooden gate wedged between two frost-dusted cliff faces, his palms still clapped over his one remaining eye, panting as if he has run a hundred miles to get here. 

A shadow detaches itself from the inside of the gate and strides towards him. He recognizes the square-shouldered gait, the golden fall of hair. Thor stops just beyond the dividing line between Hel and... the outskirts, the freezing mist of Niflheim where Loki waits to enter. 

"You're here," Loki says, forgetting all else. "You were here all this time." Thor never came back for him because he was dead. "How...?"

"Your ally," Thor says. "The one called Thanos. I flew through the portal you made. I meant to close it. I found him on the other side. Long did I fight him – long enough for the All-Father to come to my aid. Then we fought him together, but he was more powerful than any foe Asgard has ever known. Where were you, Loki?"

"I?" Loki stutters. 

"We could have used your help. Where were you?"

Loki scrambles for coherence. He is dead and all his old objectives must be sloughed off, _quickly_ , immediately, so that he can think. He is dead, but he is not yet in Hel. Where lies his advantage? Where must he cast his sights next? 

He must pass through the Gate to reach Valhalla. 

"Let me pass, brother, and I will tell you everything you wish to know," Loki says, straightening, confidence returning to his voice. 

"It isn't me who bars you entrance."

"But I –" Hasn't he died in battle? Of a sort? Could Jane Foster count as a warrior? His thoughts are all confused. 

He tries to step through the Gate, but an invisible barrier blocks his way. He stands face to face with Thor, a hand's breadth between them that can never be crossed. The rushing returns to his ears and red seems to creep again at the edges of his vision. It's as if he's dying again, or perhaps he simply never stopped dying. Hel has judged him. He is unworthy of Valhalla.

Thor looks on him with pity. Compassion. He can afford it. It's easy to be compassionate when you have a seat in Valhalla. 

"I killed them all, you know," Loki spits. He may not be able to pass through the barrier, but his words still can. "All your friends. And I did it all for you. Their loyalty to you brought them nothing but torment and death! Let that be your epitaph while you feast with our ancestors."

Thor's expression doesn't change. "And who killed you?"

The wound beneath Loki's breast burns. He can feel the secret blade still sheathed in his flesh. His skin recalls the gentle, deceptive touch of the hands that put it there. And he smiles.

"The same person, really, who killed you," he says. For why else would Thor have fought to his very death to protect Earth from Thanos? Only for sentiment. "But not before I gave her good reason." Loki grins as Thor's equanimity finally shakes. "She sends her regards, by the way. She says thank you for everything you did for her."

"I did little indeed," Thor says quietly. "I gave her what information I knew so that she might protect herself. Still, it seems that little was enough."

And he's already turning to go when it sinks in. The bodyknife. No one on Midgard could have known of its existence, but Thor – at whose side Loki fought for a thousand years, his most trusted comrade, his flesh and blood as far as the both of them suspected – knew every weapon and trick in his brother's arsenal. And had spilled all that long confidence to the slip of a girl he'd taken a fancy to for a couple of days on Midgard. Sometime after his arrival Thor must have found time to visit her and warn her that Loki might seek her out, and how to defend herself in extremity if he did. 

Loki shouts and screams, throwing himself at the barrier, but the Gate will not let him pass, and only his voice moves through unhindered, but for naught: no one is listening. He howls until Thor vanishes from sight, and then turns and blunders into the mists of Niflheim, half-blind still and the blood seeping eternally from the unhealing wound between his ribs. Niflheim is not a world like other worlds: there is no end or edge to it, nor will he ever come to the same spot twice. But he is seized with a madness that drives his feet onward and onward, and a pain boring deep inside his chest that he tells himself is the knife, the tiny unseen blade that has undone him, that seems to burrow imperceptibly ever closer to his heart.

And there he wanders still in the frozen outskirts of Hel, cursing the fates and every power in the Nine Realms except himself; and there he will wander forever until the next turning, when his story begins anew.


End file.
